E-Commerce On the Fly: "Fantastic thing for a time-starved world"

Computerworld - Imagine this: You're walking by a pizza shop, and your cell phone rings. No, it's not your mom calling to tell you to remember to wear a sweater—it's the pizza shop calling to offer you a coupon for $2 off a large pepperoni pizza. Or what about this: Your pharmacy sends you a text message telling you that you're about to run out of the medication you usually take and asks you if you want a refill. If you click "yes," the pharmacist will get your prescription ready and you can pick it up later or have the pharmacy deliver it to you.

Or this: You're having lunch with a good friend, and you mention to her that you desperately need to see a dentist. She tells you that her dentist, Dr. Goodteeth, is the greatest. Trusting her advice, you whip out your handheld device and make an appointment on the spot.

All of those scenarios, which involve mobile commerce, or m-commerce, will be possible in the next several years, according to Jaclyn Easton, the Van Nuys, Calif.-based author of Going Wireless: Transform Your Business With Mobile Technology (HarperBusiness, 2002).

"Mobile commerce is the use of wireless [devices] to facilitate the sale of goods or services, anytime, anywhere," she says. Although m-commerce has been touted as the best thing since, well, e-commerce, it just hasn't taken off the way experts thought it would in the U.S.

The reason: weaknesses in interoperability, usability, security and privacy, according to Norman Sadeh, a professor and director of the Mobile Commerce Lab at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science in Pittsburgh.

Sadeh says these issues must be resolved by standards bodies before wireless devices replace our wallets and credit cards and give us access to intelligent assistants capable of anticipating many of our needs and desires and taking care of routine tasks to help fulfill them, such as automatically arranging for taxis to pick us up after business meetings.

One such organization is the cross-industry Mobile Payment Forum in Wakefield, Mass. Billing itself as the bridge between the mobile and financial industries, the forum is working to create a foundation for secure, standardized and authenticated mobile payments that encompasses all types of transactions.

The Mobile Payment Forum is focusing on payment card transactions but is also addressing key issues such as interoperability passwords, cardholder authentication and encryption methods.

Beyond 'Infotainment'

The Mobile Commerce Lab at Carnegie Mellon is developing a prototype Semantic Web environment, called MyCampus, for context-aware mobile services for enhancing everyday campus life. The Semantic Web would enable machines to make more sense of the Web so the Web in turn would be more useful for humans. (To learn more about the Semantic Web, see "The Web's Next Leap," QuickLink 37596.) The service can be accessed via handheld over the university's wireless LAN.